July 21, 2011

If you work a lot with QlikView then you probably miss a lot of small usability features there. One that I miss strongly -- is a hot key to exit Edit Expression dialog with changes applied. At least it could be possible if they did confirmation popup (invoked by pressing ESC) not as "Close the dialog and lose the changes?" (so you either lost changes or stay in dialog) but "Save changes and exit? Yes/No". Arghhhh.......

Yet, some hot keys do exist. For instance in Chart Properties Expressions tab you can use these hotkeys instead of dragging your mouse back and forth every time:

E - demote expression in list (move down)

P - promote expression in list (move up)

Enter - open Edit Expression dialog

F - go to edit expression definition (that small textarea in the tab)

D - delete expression

A+A -- add new expression (don't ask me why it has to be pressed twice -- this is Qlikview)

B - enable/disable expression

M - open mini chart settings (for mini charts only)

T - toggle representation (with awkward behaviour)

R - toggle relative (musthave hotkey, duh!)

It would be reasonable to at least add capability to move selection of expression by up/down arrows. Can we hope to have this in any future release?

If you know any other useful hot keys -- feel free to say it in comments here.

Note 1: All this relates to Qlikview 9. Qlikview 10 might have some of these issues resolved.
Note 2: These hotkeys might be not intended by design but exist as side effect.

PS. By the way, do you know that moving your hand from keyboard to mouse takes 0.7sec and moving it back takes 0.9sec. You can spend up to half an hour every day just for useless movements just because of absence of convenient hot keys.